This study was carried out to determine the seroprevalence of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) infection of cattle in selected districts in the central region of Uganda. Until recently MAP infection was unknown in any domestic or wild life species in Uganda and the neighbouring regions. To determine the extent of the challenge posed by this new threat, 943 heads of cattle from ...

Pentastomids are obligate zoonotic arthropod parasites utilising canids and vulpids as their definitive hosts and several herbivorous species as their intermediate hosts. Reported only 10 times in Australia over the last 150 years as incidental findings, adult Pentastomids referred to as Linguatula serrata have been encountered in nasal cavities of domestic and wild dogs, and foxes. Nymphs have...

The attire of the Tyrolean Iceman, a 5,300-year-old natural mummy from the Ötzal Italian Alps, provides a surviving example of ancient manufacturing technologies. Research into his garments has however, been limited by ambiguity surrounding their source species. Here we present a targeted enrichment and sequencing of full mitochondrial genomes sampled from his clothes and quiver, which elucidat...

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy was a novel spongiform encephalopathy, in an hitherto unaffected species, that had characteristics of a point source epidemic, with an agent that could have been incorporated into a wide variety of feedstuffs and iatrogenically administered to naïve populations, and there was early evidence that it was not restricted to bovines. It was vital to establish, albeit...

Electroretinogram (ERG) flicker photometry was used to measure the spectral properties of cones in three common ungulates-cattle (Bos taurus), goats (Capra hircus), and sheep (Ovis aries). Two cone mechanisms were identified in each species. The location of peak sensitivity of an S-cone mechanism varied from about 444 to 455 nm for the three species; analogous values for an M/L-cone were tightl...

In farm animals (bovine, ovine, swine, rabbit and poultry), muscle fibre characteristics play a key role in meat quality. The present review summarises the knowledge on muscle fibre characteristics and ontogenesis in these species. Myofibre ontogenesis begins very early during embryonic life, with the appearance of two or three successive waves of myoblasts which constitute the origin of the di...

The taurine and zebuine cattle breeds comprise the majority of the world cattle population but their taxonomic status is still controversial. The two forms of cattle are currently classified as Bos taurus and Bos indicus species and are differentiated primarily by the presence or absence of a hump. However, these two species hybridize readily, producing fully fertile offspring. We have determin...

Distinctive plant growth and development have been associated with resistance to defoliation by herbivores. Descriptions of resistance (tolerance/avoidance) strategies are common, although little is known about genetic variation affecting their expression in natural plant communities. This research compared response to three frequencies of defoliation in populations of Bouteloua curtipendula va...

BACKGROUND In Uganda, Rhodesian sleeping sickness, caused by Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, and animal trypanosomiasis caused by T. vivax and T. congolense, are being controlled by treating cattle with trypanocides and/or insecticides. We used a mathematical model to identify treatment coverages required to break transmission when host populations consisted of various proportions of wild and d...

net) with the maximum-likelihood algorithm and a boot-strap of 1,000 replicates, we constructed a phylogenetic tree (online Technical Appendix Figure). All 8 sequences clustered within subtype 4d of HEV. The sequences were similar to each other (95.5%–99.8% similarity in nucleotide sequence) and similar to sequences reported for other cattle (83.3%–85.3%; online Technical Appendix Figure). More...